Aimé-Jules Dalou (31 December 1838, in Paris – 15 April 1902, in Paris) was a French sculptor, recognized as one of the most brilliant virtuosos of nineteenth-century France, admired for his perceptiveness, execution, and unpretentious realism.

Dalou first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1861,[4][3] but he made no secret of his working-class sympathies. His politics obstructed his career under the Second Empire: he was repeatedly refused the Prix de Rome that opened sculptors' careers to future official commissions. He started to work for decorators, and through this work met Auguste Rodin and began their friendship.[5] He made a quiet living providing decorative sculpture for the structures that lined Paris's new boulevards and providing wax models for jewelry. He married Irma Vuillier, a partnership that sustained him throughout his life; they had one daughter, Georgette, who was mentally handicapped and required constant care. Dalou's Daphnis and Chloe shown at the Paris salon of 1869, was purchased by the State.

In his eight-year English exile, Dalou's association with City and Guilds of London Art School, the National Art Training School[6] and the artists of the New Sculpture movement laid the foundation for new developments in the post-classical British school of sculpture.[3] He also recommended his friend and colleague Édouard Lantéri to move from France to England. At the same time Dalou executed a remarkable series of terracotta statuettes and groups, such as A French Peasant Woman and The Reader; a series of Boulogne women, such as A Woman of Boulogne telling her Beads;[7] and a series of informal terracotta portrait busts of friends and acquaintances, rarely signed. He was commissioned to produce the large public fountain called Charity, erected at the back of the Royal Exchange (1878), and for Queen Victoria a monument to two young granddaughters in her private chapel at Windsor (1878).

He returned to France in 1879, after the declaration of amnesty, and produced a number of masterpieces. His great relief of Mirabeau replying to Dreux-Brézé illustrating an encounter of 23 June 1789, which was exhibited in 1883 and later at the Palais Bourbon, and the highly decorative panel Fraternity were followed in 1885 by The Triumph of Silenus. For the city of Paris he executed his most elaborate and splendid achievement, the vast monument, The Triumph of the Republic (pictured left), erected, after twenty years work, in the Place de la Nation, showing a symbolical figure of the Republic, aloft on her car, drawn by lions led by Liberty, attended by Labour and Justice, and followed by Abundance. It is somewhat in the taste of the Louis XIV period, ornate, but with a forward thrust to the ensemble and exquisite in every detail.[7]